by Nancy Rue
The silence in the sanctuary was pure, the air perfect for rearranging the words in my head.
I’ll pay off all your sin, Demi. You are sin-free.
I want you to be generous with your forgiveness.
I want you to tell everyone that I did this for you.
I want you to, Demi.
You have to.
“Mom?” Jayne whispered. “You okay?”
I looked down to see her hand rubbing my fist, clenched so tightly my veins stood out like strands of blue yarn.
You have to tell everyone I did this for you.
“People will try to take away your freedom from guilt, Jesus says.” Ethan tilted his head kindly. “They’ll try to shame you, pull you back into separation, tell you that you’re stupid to believe He actually did this for you.”
Almost of its own accord, my head turned and my eyes moved Kevin St. Clair into focus. He stared straight ahead, as if not looking at Ethan would cancel him out. If a word reached him, it bounced off like so much hail on tin.
But it reached me—wormed down into me—pulled open the pocket—curled inside. I didn’t know what to do with it yet. I only knew it was there.
“That, people,” Ethan said, “is what the Cross is about.”
Heads tilted back, pulled by his words to the cross he stood before.
“The death we grieved once again last Friday, there on that cross, was the final payment on all your debts—your sins—whatever you want to call them. The shame and the guilt—” He raised an arm, dignified and strong. “Gone. Now hear—and hear me well—because this is the Easter message. In His eyes, no matter what you have done—at the foot of this cross, where we are today—”
He scanned the congregation, making sure, Sully knew, that every eye, ear, and mind was centered there. “It is as if it never happened,” he said. “Never.”
Ethan’s eyes swept across the sanctuary and came to me.
“Never,” he said again.
When he bowed his head, mine sank.
Now—I want you to be generous with your forgiveness, Demi. I want you to tell the world that I did this for you. You have to.
By the time the final hymn ended, the chapel was alive. Risen, I thought, was the word. The congregation burst into exchanges of the rush we’d all shared in. Through it, I heard someone call, “Dr. C.!”
A lumbering body topped with red hair came at me, trailed by what looked like every student I’d ever mentored. The Faith and Doubt group—my ultimate concern in a life so far away from me, it seemed like a mirage even as it surrounded me with khakis and polo shirts and teetery sandals—and idealism and love.
Brandon lifted me from my feet in a hug, and hands of all sizes and states of moisture rubbed my back and touched my arms.
“We thought you were in a coma or something!” Marcy said.
They coaxed a laugh out of me—which faded as I looked over Brandon’s bony shoulder at Sullivan Crisp, turning away and elbowing his way toward the door like he was chased by a pack of dogs.
I patted Brandon to put me down. The kids closed me in, away from Sullivan’s retreat.
“This is like a total God-thing that you’re here,” Chelsea said.
“You have to know Faith and Doubt is coming apart,” Brandon said.
Marcy’s wide face opened up to me. “Can’t you please meet with us?”
“There’s no way they can keep you from being a consultant.”
“We’d meet totally off campus.”
“You don’t even know what’s going on here.”
“And you need to.”
Marcy pressed against my arm. “This isn’t just a project anymore, Dr. C. This is about keeping this place from turning into a convent— and I am not kidding you.”
Brandon put his hand up. “Look, Dr. C.,” he said, “I know we messed around a lot when you and Dr. Archer were working with us—but that was before we felt like we were living under the St. Clair regime. I mean, Faith and Doubt is about what Dr. Kaye was saying.” He nodded, with a wisdom that belied the freckles and the frat-boy haircut. “But nothing like that is going on at this school. We can’t let this keep happening.”
I felt a warm hand creep into mine and looked down at Audrey. For the moment, there was no pregnancy in those eyes.
She made me say, “I’ll see, you guys. I’ll pray about it.”
I hadn’t said those words for weeks, but they tumbled from my lips as if they’d been poised for me to come back to them.
I want you to tell everyone.
As my students—still my students—filtered away, I felt a surge, small, but with a maybe in it. Maybe, in some way, I could.
My eyes went to the door. But I would have to do it without Sullivan Crisp.
CHAPTER TWENTY - NINE
Monday night I made a new list.
I’d abandoned the old one due to lack of results, but I read it over—wistfully—before I hit DELETE.
GET RICH BACK
A. SEE DR. SULLIVAN CRISP
B. DO WHAT HE SAYS
FOCUS ON KIDS
A. CALL JAYNE
B. CALL CHRISTOPHER
I looked up from the laptop.
Jayne was doing pre-algebra at the snack bar. Audrey studied on the window seat, between pained gazes out at the sound.
It was a far different scene from the vacuum I’d tried to escape from in my first list. Interesting, I thought, that my expectations had been so high—that I had thought by merely checking things off I could put my family back together. I felt a wave of anxiety. I wasn’t much closer to any of them now than I was then.
Except for Jayne. And the whisper—you have to—you have to— that had followed me out of the chapel and everywhere since. Which was the reason for a new list.
That, and the terse conversation I’d had with Mickey the night before.
I was paying the pizza delivery boy—a large, original crust with pineapple and ham being our Easter fare—when she appeared on the steps. She barely waited for the kid to flee to his car under her bullet-eyed glare.
“I’m just going to go ahead and ask you,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Audrey is staying with us.”
“I’m paying for a dorm room.”
“Which she can’t stand to be in by herself.” I shifted the hot pizza box to my hip. “Listen, do you want to come in and talk about this? I know you don’t eat pizza, but I owe you a meal.”
“Look, I know I haven’t been acting like Mother of the Year over this thing. I can’t get my mind around it—I’m, like, disconnected from myself.”
“I hear that.”
She put up both hands, rotating her palms like she was erasing me. “Now Audrey doesn’t want to be with me—and I get that—so you just do your thing and let me know if she needs anything from me.”
Pain smeared her face—and broke my heart.
“I’m doing for her what you’ve done for me,” I said.
“Don’t try to go there with me again,” she said. “I can’t do it for her—I don’t know why. And I have to tell you, it’s killing me that you can. I feel like a piece of—”
“Do you want me to move out?”
She looked away.
I changed the pizza box to the other hip.
“If I put you out, that puts Audrey out too. I’m not Mommy Dearest.”
“I never said—”
“Do you want to keep working at the Bread?”
I blinked. “Do you want me to?”
“You need the money.”
“True—but I don’t need the dirty looks.”
“I won’t bring it into the workplace. I don’t want to hire anybody else.” She blinked hard and turned and went up the stairs.
So I’d gone to work that morning, and, needless to say, I didn’t sit on my customary stool and sob. Mickey and I avoided each other, and Oscar ran interference when our being in the same air space couldn’t be avoided. Mickey was civil and uncertain with
Audrey when she arrived in the afternoon, but at that point I felt myself defrost. Audrey needed my hand on her arm when she passed by and my nod that she could make it through that order, that pile of dishes, that searing look at me from her mother.
The searing looks made me type now:
FIND A NEW APARTMENT
MOVE GIRLS IN
FIND A NEW JOB
And even
PRAY
There was one item from the old list I hadn’t deleted. I shook my head at the popcorn Jayne offered me and pressed my fingers to my temples as I surveyed the screen.
GET RICH BACK
The pain and fear chugged in. No papers had been filed, no phone call came from a lawyer. Nothing. Even Christopher had been quiet.
I typed:
CONFRONT CHRISTOPHER
That had to happen soon. Putting his name on the screen trumped all fear and replaced it with the teeth-gritting, blood-pressure-rising ire I experienced every time I thought of the boy. The boy—who possessed less maturity than his still-a-child sister who at this moment held a crying Audrey in the kitchen.
“What’s happening?” I said. I rounded the snack bar.
“I don’t know,” Jayne mouthed.
“It just comes over me sometimes,” Audrey said.
“The baby?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I know I want to keep him, Dr. C. I decided that today.”
“Are you sure?”
“This is my baby. It’s the only thing I do know.”
Behind her, Jayne was silently clapping her hands. I decided not to go into the ramifications of that decision. Who knew better than I did how making up your mind about something could keep you hanging on?
“I’m crying over stupid C.J.” Audrey backed away and leaned against the counter. “I called him again today—like a moron— because I thought after he had time to think about it, he might change his mind and help me. You know what he said?”
Let me guess.
“He said he made sure we used protection—so he didn’t see how I could be pregnant by him.”
“Hello!” Jayne said, a handful of popcorn halfway to her mouth. “Even I know there is no one hundred percent birth control! Well, except not-sex.”
If I hadn’t been so ready to flush the elusive C.J. down the toilet I would have had trouble hiding a smile. At least I’d done something right.
“And then he goes—” Audrey swallowed back a sob. “He goes, ‘So if it looks like a tramp, and it acts like a tramp, it must be a tramp.’” She put her face in her hands. “I was never with another guy before him. I’m not like that. I’m not a tramp!”
“No, sweetheart, you’re not,” I said.
That was a feeling I knew, too, every time I let Zach Archer slither back into my thoughts. I wasn’t a tramp who succumbed to a man’s compassion when she was down.
When the girls went to bed, I reopened The List and typed:
CANCEL THERAPY
I couldn’t face Sullivan again. I wasn’t sure I could face anything again. I was crashing.
Until the whisper.
You have to, Demi.
You have to.
The apartment I found Tuesday after another walking-on-porcupine-quills shift at the Daily Bread was in Gerst—a funky litttle village overlooking the scenic Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
The complex, called Sherman Heights, consisted of a tumble of A-frames arranged on the side of a hill like Monopoly houses. Highway 3 roared below, but the place had a certain summer camp feel if you faced uphill. When I took Jayne and Audrey there that evening they were charmed by the creek that ran along the edge of the property, canopied by towering evergreens and willows that swept the foxglove-and-fern-covered ground.
They were less enamored of the cabin itself. While they thought the cedar tree, which grew right up out of the kitchen floor and up through the ceiling, was endlessly cool, their lips curled increasingly as they made the ten-second tour.
Tunnel of a kitchen with a curved eating bar.
A space barely large enough for two chairs and a love seat in the center.
A corner bathroom that opened into a closet with a random counter along one wall.
Narrow steps that led up to an alcove taken up with a double futon.
Period.
Jayne sat on the spiral stairs and hunched to look at me from under the metal banister. “It’s kind of depressing, Mom. It’s really dark in here.”
I had to agree. The large window in the living—well, everything— room was shrouded in olive green drapes straight out of a 1970s mobile home.
“Here’s your trouble right here,” I said. “We’re missing our view.”
I yanked the cord that would, in theory, open them, but it snapped in my hand.
Audrey snorted.
“Okay, Plan B,” I said.
I stood on one of the spindly wooden chairs and grabbed hold of the top of the curtains and hauled sideways. The rod gave up and came co-operatively out of the wall like a surrendering fugitive, and I felt myself falling backward—and then straight down, as the chair split and opened up so I could crumple to the floor, curtain rod, hideous drapes, and all.
“Mom!” Jayne said. “Are you okay?”
The mandatory daughterly concern was lost in that kind of laughter only an adolescent girl can produce. I looked up at Audrey, standing over me, keeping up in the eighteen-year-old version.
“That takes care of that issue,” I said. “Now we have a view.”
“Of the front of the Jeep!”
Jayne spewed spit and collapsed against Audrey. “I love it!” she said in a shriek.
“Good,” I said. “We’ll move in tomorrow.”
The job situation was not as easily remedied. I was only halfhearted in my perusal of the want ads early Wednesday morning. Besides, I couldn’t even hear myself read through the whispers.
I want you to tell everyone I did this for you.
There’s no way they can keep you from being a consultant.
You have to, Demi. You have to.
God was not forthcoming about how I was going to make a living, however. I gritted my teeth and went back to the Daily Bread. One thing at a time.
We moved in that night, a process that took approximately two hours.
With my clothes hung up in my two feet of the closet, designated by color-coded markers Jayne cut out of cardboard, my laptop set up on the kitchen counter, and a throw tossed over the love seat to hide the bulging springs, I was in.
The anxiety pulsed. How much more readjusting could I do without letting go of hope? I needed to move forward with the list. I had to.
I sat gingerly on a backless stool at the curvy counter whose saving grace was its proximity to the indoor tree trunk. The smell of cedar was calming. So, in a sense, was the list when I brought it up on the screen.
FIND A NEW APARTMENT
Check.
MOVE GIRLS IN
Check.
FIND A NEW JOB
Maybe tomorrow.
PRAY ABOUT FAITH AND DOUBT
I’d done that, too. Since Sunday, every morning at 3:00 AM when I woke up, gave up on any more sleep for the night, and lay awake trying to stay inside my skin, God had shown up, almost viscerally pulling at me, and I had no choice but to go where He took me.
Once there, seeing the faces of my students who for those moments in the chapel passed into a place of gritty spirituality that went beyond grade-point averages, I couldn’t get my mind around a clear plan. In spite of their voices touching me like eager hands—
a total God-thing
Faith and Doubt is coming apart
we’d meet totally off campus
it isn’t just a project anymore, Dr. C.
We have to tell the world what it really means.
The question was—how?
“Dr. C.?”
I looked around the tree at Audrey, who stood in the doorway.
“I have to quit school,�
�� she said.
I was around the tree and on the love seat with her before the tears started.
“It’s in the handbook.”
“It says you have to drop out if you get pregnant?”
She nodded. “You can’t be pregnant out of wedlock—you can’t be cohabitating with a person of the opposite gender.” She offered me said book, which I waved away.
“And as soon as I start to show, you know somebody like Dr. St. Clair is going to—”
“Stop right there—” I didn’t add before I throw up. “You’re, what, six, seven weeks along?”
“I think so.”
I looked at her closely. “Have you actually seen a doctor?”
“No. I just did a pregnancy test. Two of them.”
I made a note to add GET PRENATAL CARE FOR AUDREY to The List.
“There are only about five more weeks left in the semester,” I said. “You aren’t going to start to show until summer, Audrey.”
“I counted, though. The baby’s due in November. That means I can’t come back next semester. And school is just starting to mean something, especially if you work with us on F&D again.” She flopped against the back of the love seat.
I stroked the back of her hand and picked through my brain for an answer.
“The semester after that,” I said finally, “you’ll have a baby to take care of—if you’re still planning to—”
“I saw a social worker at the clinic today.”
I was startled.
“There are all kinds of programs I can get into, especially since I’m in school.” She squeezed her hands together, as if she were putting a new self into place. “It’s going to be hard, but this is my baby, and I want him.”
“Or her,” Jayne said from the loft.
I glanced up to see her belly-down on the futon.
“I want my baby to have a mother I know will understand her.” Audrey put her arms around my neck. “I want to be a mom like you.”
I was on the phone to Ethan Kaye at eight the next morning.
“Demi.” His voice, though welcoming, was a thin version of Sunday’s sermon baritone. “It’s good to hear from you.”